


Count the Bones

by Anarhichas



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Compliant, Dystopia, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 18:16:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3738547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarhichas/pseuds/Anarhichas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shiganshina has fallen; Eren, Mikasa and Armin live in landfill. It is winter. Hardship makes animals from even children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings include spoilers for the fic: cannibalism.
> 
> Thank you for reading – any concrit will be happily received!

It is Eren who kills the girl, with Armin’s cries still in his head, spinning around and around; he drops the branch, his latest murder-weapon. He doesn’t do anything else. He is only eleven years old, but he knows what death is.

Mikasa crouches next to the limp body, inspecting the malnutrition and disease pocks, the old open sores, the blood in the dirt-coloured hair. She also knows of death. She goes through the girl’s pockets but there is nothing in them. Mikasa is disappointed – even starving five-year-olds can make decent thieves, sometimes.

Armin shudders and shivers in their make-shift bed. He isn’t doing so because of the attack, but because of the illness that has been ravaging his body for the past fortnight. He is lucky Eren had been there to save him. He wouldn’t have been able to save himself.

They close the door of their room, that they rent for two pennies a week, and which consists of four leaky walls, a leaky ceiling, a pile of rags to sleep in, and a fire pit they had dug themselves in the dirt floor.

'We'll put her in the river,' Eren says, as they look at the body. 'When it gets dark.' They all know the punishment for murder is hanging. They have been in the landfill for just over one year; they are children and children are quick learners.

Mikasa doesn’t say anything, but for her, that’s agreement. Armin hesitates and his friends look at him expectantly. But he shakes his head, moans a little in aching hunger and buries himself back into their rag-pile. His whole body hurts. Dark thoughts turn in his head. Mikasa and then Eren go over to him, bury themselves down with him, and try warm him up with their own cold bodies.

Night comes quickly. It is winter. Eren and Mikasa are trying to find pieces of cloth out of the bed large enough to wrap the body in; they are failing, and badly. Armin watches them. He would help, but is too weak.

‘Wait,’ he says at last, as they decide to simply carry her piggy-back, and hope no one looks too closely. Obediently, Eren and Mikasa wait. The girl’s head flops forward as she is jostled by Eren, who adjusts his grip.

‘Eugen found a stray dog,’ Armin says. ‘He managed to kill it…’

Eren and Mikasa are dutifully impressed – there aren’t many animals left in the slums, least of all dogs. The crop failure of the last year, the overpopulation, and the winter are lowering everyone’s standards.

‘He sold the meat,’ Armin carries on, winding about the topic, ready to drop it at a moment’s notice. As he pauses, waiting to see if they’ll get it without further explanation, he wonders whether the sickness has ruined his mind as well as his body. Or maybe he’s always been like this.

Mikasa blinks, eyes hardening a little. She has got it. Eren looks at her, brow furrowed; he has not. Then, two seconds later, his face clears of puzzlement.

He puts down the body.

Mikasa raids a nearby butchers, a recent casualty who had managed to hang on, for a while, until the inevitable happened. No one wants meat hooks and chef’s knives and chopping boards – not here, not any more. The door breaks under the heel of her fraying shoes. She takes what she needs and leaves quickly. Theft is punishable by hanging, too.

There is nowhere private to work, save their own room. They strip the girl of her clothes, which are added to the rag-pile. The ground is too hard to dig properly, now, but Eren works at it. Mikasa does the butchery. She lived on a farm, once; she knows how.

Armin looks on as she slices open the body and pulls out the guts. They are shrunken and empty. She cuts the stomach from intestines and place them both on the oilskin she’d laid out earlier. She finds and removes the liver, kidneys, lungs and heart. Armin tries to distinguish them, but cannot. His parents had been poor, and he’d only learnt of meat and organs through a medical book Eren had once lent him. These red, wet masses look nothing like the diagrams.

Mikasa slices off the small amount of meat around the cheeks, then the tongue. She cracks open the skull and removes the brain. This, at least, Armin recognises. She tears thin strips from the neck, shoulders, torso, belly, buttocks and back, and works down the arms, then legs. She skins the meat as she goes. It is wasteful, but there are no animals that have human skin, after all.

The bones are red where Mikasa cuts them from each other. The knife makes a scraping noise as she works it between the joints. She leaves the spine and ribcage, which is webbed with a marbled pink membrane, whole. The skinned hands are striped with thick white ribbons. Mikasa cuts them away, cuts off the meat of the thumbs, sections and slices and severs until there is nothing human left at all.

Dismembering the body takes the better part of the night. It is hard to see, with only a small fire, but at least the smoke hides most of the smell. Armin tried to count the bones but loses track quickly. There seem to be hundreds. He hadn’t realised there were so many.

Once finished Eren takes the skull and skin, the eyeballs and hair, finger and toenails, wrapped up in a pouch. He will hide them far away while there is still darkness to cover him. Armin helps Mikasa to scrape the soil Eren had dug over the blood and other fluids that got spilt on the floor.

Mikasa goes to clean herself, to wash away the evidence in freezing cold river water. Armin is left with the sack of bones and meat. It is strange to think, he ponders, that that was a young girl, half a day ago. He is exhausted. He falls asleep.

He wakes from violent nightmares, creeping, disturbing dreams that make him cry and tremble in his sleep. It’s probably not because of the girl. He’s been having them for a while, now.

He is still alone. He is so very hungry.


	2. Chapter 2

Mikasa doesn’t return, but that’s not worrying: she has a job, after all, in the glass factory. She works ten hour shifts; she would work more, but these days even the middle and upper classes are having to cut down.

It is Eren and Armin, therefore, who head out to sell last night’s spoils. It goes very quickly, and to adults, who have enough to spare that they can afford a small taste of luxury. It is the adults, too, who have real money. Coins are worth little in the slums. It is not the slums that Eren and Armin head to, once they have sold and traded all the meat and bones, the little girl, and stashed away their precious returns: clothes, potatoes, onions and bread bulked up with chalk powder.

Eren’s face is hardened. Armin isn’t comfortable with the tall, finely dressed folk who look down their noses at his rags and dirty, straggle-ended hair, but Eren holds his hand and drags him onward. Eren knows the way. He is insistent. This is the end that justifies the means, and he won’t back down from it now.

The stop at a door. Above the door is a word: Physician.

Eren bangs on the door once, twice, three times. It opens, and a middle aged woman looks out. She is dressed well, and fed well, and the room behind her is warm – but only by the standards of landfill-children.

Her eyes narrow; she stands solidly, ready for battle. Armin’s head is heavy, swimming, and his bones painful. He wants to sink into the ground and sleep.

‘We have money,’ is the first thing Eren says, aggression before he has a chance to even try defence. ‘We can pay just as well as anyone.’

‘Where are your parents?’ the woman counters. Despite her stance, her voice, Armin thinks, is more tired than angry.

‘What does that matter?’ Eren doesn’t answer her question, really, but what he does say speaks loud enough.

‘You have a job?’

‘My sister does.’

‘Look,’ the woman says. ‘I can’t help you. It’s against the law. You’re only kids, so you need family or your boss to come see me first. The patient’s boss, not your sister’s.’

Eren is too dumbfounded to reply, but Armin is not surprised. It makes sense. Or maybe he’s just too tired to be puzzled.

‘I can’t help you,’ the woman says again.

Then Eren gets over his mute outrage. His building, self-righteous fury is almost tangible. He is very close to stamping his feet as his little fists clench. Armin pulls at his sleeve.

‘We can go to someone else,’ he says. His voice is barely a whisper. He doesn’t feel like he can manage much more.

So they go to someone else. They get the same response.

‘How dare you? How dare you call yourself a doctor!’ Eren screams at the man’s back, as he walks away from them, down the drizzle-damp street. ‘You’re not a doctor! You’re nothing! You’re scum!’

Eren picks up a stone and throws it. It hits the man on the back of his head, but it doesn’t do any real damage. Even Eren is struggling, this winter. The man flinches, and pauses, but doesn’t turn. He carries on walking until he rounds a corner and is out of sight. Eren’s thin chest is heaving with the exertion of childish rage.

They go home, after that. There are Military Police about, and though neither Eren nor Armin know the punishment for assault of a citizen, they can guess well enough.

When Mikasa returns that night Eren is sitting motionless, staring into their little fire. Armin is buried in the bed, and he is crying. His skin is cold and clammy with sweat. His stomach heaves but he has nothing left to throw up. His fever comes and goes every third day. He is weak. Every third day he is weaker.

Mikasa is tired, pale skin dark with soot. She places a damp bread roll by Eren’s side and takes the other to Armin, settling down in the bed with him. She holds him and waits until he can breath steadily enough to eat.

Armin eats. Ten minutes later he throws up. With trembling fingers he finds the brown clots of vomit and swallows them down, one by one, slimy and warm and acidic on his tongue. He is too hungry to care. He is too well-practiced at this for reluctance.

This time he manages to keep it down. Beyond the pain, and exhaustion, and fear of death, he is dimly grateful for this. Food is never better the more times it’s been eaten.

‘We can bribe someone to say they’re employing him,’ Mikasa says, when Armin manages to whisper the day’s account. ‘Or there are people here, in landfill, who know about medicine. We can pay one of them.’

Eren looks at her with hooded eyes. ‘They’re doctors,’ he says, after a long, silent pause. The fire is too small to make any noise. ‘They... they should have helped. It’s what they do.’

Mikasa doesn’t bother replying.


End file.
